But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years – problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space – and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.

How’s That, written & produced by Arca and FKA twigs.
Video by Jesse Kanda.

The body is what allows this person to operate and become aware in the world. I’ve always been envious of dancers and gymnasts who use their bodies both as a medium of expression and also a means of experience.
The body becomes a site of action, interaction and experimentation. Using this particular body means bypassing ethical issues that some of the projects and performances would generate, if they were performed on other bodies.
And of course there is the realization that we are no longer merely biological bodies.

Rather, the body has become a chimera, a combination of meat, metal and code.

Referring to a mask as a law of nature is another way of saying that it cannot be escaped or transcended; there is no getting beyond or beneath it.
But when Deleuze describes the intention of interpretation, we find it is ‘an art of piercing masks, of discovering the one that masks himself, why he does it and the point of keeping up the mask while it is being reshaped’.”

The Nietzschean-inspired disavowal of ideology is based on the claim that critique is only an ongoing series of interpretations where masks give way to nothing but more of their own. Deleuze’s instruction is to pierce masks so that motivations and strategies can be discovered, whether they belong to subjects or to a particular manifestation of power.
The obvious implication is that the appearance of a mask obscures other qualities that are potentially more fundamental than just another mask.

An experimental work based upon the ideas of technological reincarnation and the digital crypt.
Process breakdown available at: callmeclark.com/decrypt-process-book
Created as a part of the Adobe Mentorship Program.
Special thanks to Adobe and everyone involved in this project.